Increasingly, application developers and cloud-service providers collect various types of personal information. Mobile applications, in particular, may access and collect personal information about application users, their purchases, movements, contacts, daily schedule, interests, and even personal habits. For example, many application developers and cloud-service providers base their businesses on collecting personal information. A common business model is to provide a free or low-cost application or service to attract a large number of users, gather personal information from these users, and sell the information collected to advertisers or market researchers.
Although users may grant access to their personal data when installing an application or creating a user account, many remain unaware of what personal data is being collected and where it is going. Users may be surprised, for example, to discover that a game they play on a smartphone may collect contact information from their address book, track their physical location, and send this information to the game developer, who may be located in another country or who may store the collected data with a cloud-storage service located in yet another country. To further complicate matters, each legal jurisdiction may have different laws governing data privacy and when data must be disclosed to government entities.
Data collection and privacy issues become even more complex when the data collected is proprietary to a business or other organization that may have policies and/or legal or contractual obligations governing information privacy. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems for reporting the attempted transmission of sensitive information.